The Ralston Society

The Ralston Society was a small American publisher operating in Meriden, Connecticut in the 1930s, and it exists in publishing memory almost entirely because of a single title.

It published Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich in 1937, which has since sold in the tens of millions of copies across almost ninety years and is the founding text of modern success literature. Almost every book in that genre published since follows its structure of numbered principles, a promise in the title, and anecdotes about named wealthy men.

The company itself did not survive, and the book has been reissued by a long succession of publishers, with the Napoleon Hill Foundation controlling the estate and much of the licensing.